Ghost Stories

"I'm trying to get at that mood of Hammer films and other European horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies - it's their cheesiness, their bad effects and sound quality that often gives them an unworldly quality and indefinable otherness, beyond the director's intent."
Jim Jupp, Ghost Box


There's a new exhibition of the graphic work of Jim Jupp's Ghost Box co-founder Julian House. It's tiny. A few posters, a few book cover mock-ups and a couple of TVs showing videowork. So tiny it's almost spectral. But there's enough to project a tracing of the visual ideas behind the musical output of Ghost Box. The references to be found in Ghost Box visuals are children's TV of the seventies, Penguin book covers of the same time, the horror stories of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, public information shorts ("I am the spirit of dark and lonely water") - what House calls "a very British kind of weird".




Simon Reynolds has written extensively and astutely about the nostalgia that's embedded in Ghost Box sounds and visuals. He talks of a search for futures past and alternative futures ("looking for latent, undeveloped possibilities in glam rock, light entertainment ... and that genre of movie-score Britjazz that fills your mind'e eye with hues of brown and yellow ...": Reynolds, The Wire, Nov 2006). A kind of revivification of yesterday's pop cultures.

Can't argue with that. But I wonder if there isn't something simpler going on here too, a haunting of a different order. Is there perhaps an elusive, incohate nostalgia for childhood itself? And the mysteries of childhood, when the world - especially the adult world - can seem strange and imcomprehensible. A mystery that evaporates as we get older and understand - or think we understand - more about the world. Is Ghost Box - music and viuals - an attempt to recreate that mystery, refracted through the science fiction and horror stories we watched on TV and in the movies when we were young.

Who haunts us? Often it's the ghost of our younger selves. (TJ)